Academic Dossier Microsoft Enterprise Consortium

What is the Microsoft Enterprise Consortium?

The Microsoft Enterprise Consortium is a joint program between the Department of Information Systems in the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville (Walton College) and Microsoft Corporation (MS). The purpose of this joint program is provide to the academic community access to large and compelling real world datasets for both teaching and research. The datasets are to support business intelligence, data mining, database instruction, and data warehousing by university faculty and researchers.

The initial large live datasets include -

• The initial large live datasets include Sam’s Club Sales Transactions Database with 6 tables and more than 55 million rows.
• Dillard’s Department Store Sales Database with 5 tables and more than 128 million rows.
• COPA Frozen Foods, Inc. Financials with 6 dimension tables linked to a fact table containing almost 12 million rows.

Walton College manages and operates the infrastructure that supports the database storage and maintains and manages the server and datasets within the college. The current configuration of this data mining/data warehousing server contains multiple months of Point of Sale (POS) transactions from Sam’s Club stores and Dillard’s department stores.

How is the Academic community using it? (was formerly - Why does it matter?)

Student and classroom access to datasets of this type and size for instructional purposes, business intelligence, data mining, and data warehousing is unprecedented. This unprecedented data resource is available as a result of ongoing relationships with the companies providing these large live datasets. This fact alone makes the Microsoft Enterprise Consortium an incredible opportunity for you as an educator or researcher if you elect to participate.

Members of the Microsoft Enterprise Consortium are encouraged to contribute course modules that can be used in university courses and by Microsoft Enterprise Consortium members as a cornerstone of the integration of database, data mining, data modeling, business intelligence, and ERP in their curriculum. Course modules allow students to learn modern programming languages in conjunction with modern relation databases using real, large scale databases are also part of the Microsoft Enterprise Consortium offering.

The University of Arkansas is developing the following course modules -

• VB.NET 2005
• Database Management using SQL
• Business Warehouse/Business Intelligence (Data Mining)

How can Microsoft help?

Microsoft provides support to Microsoft Enterprise Consortium universities to use these datasets by -

• Providing a robust set of course materials for use in teaching and research.
• Hosting training events and seminars on database basics, data mining, data warehousing, and business intelligence

How can I learn more?

You can get more information about Microsoft Enterprise Consortium site.

From this site you can view information about the current suite of large live datasets as well as the datasets that are in process of being migrated to the server for future use. This page also provide information so faculty members or university researchers can also sign up for access to these datasets – following validation that you represent a university.